South AfricanÂ ex-pat, Gareth Knight,Â just mailed me about the success of his recently launched startup Kindo, an online family tree application.

They've managed to signup users around the world by very quickly offering it in 14 different languages.Â Of course, having startup capital from the guys behind Skype and Last.fmÂ must have helped that along nicely.

Translation into the other languages was a smart move, because they access market verticals on a regional level. According to TechCrunch, this creates a barrier to entry for other would-be players in this space.

Despite the popularity of sites like MySpace and Facebook globally, there are many examples of social-network success on a regional level:

Â Skyrock is the biggest social network in France (Alexa Rank 2), bigger than WindowsLive, YouTube, Yahoo or Ebay there;

StudiVZ (Germany) is the biggest soc. net. in Germany and the 6th biggest site in Germany (Alexa);

There are at least 10-15 massively successful local social networks, some more of them are vkontakte.ru (Russia), Mynet.com (turkey), netlog.com (Benelux+France)...

I sincerely hope that we see the same patterns emerge in South Africa, and we start seeing sites like Zoopy.com, MyVideo.co.za, Afrigator.com, Amatomu.co.za, Laaik.it, and Muti.co.za out-ranking their international counterpart'sÂ traffic in our country.Â Do you think is likely?